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Infor Birst

Infor Birst

Overview

What is Infor Birst?

Infor Birst offers multi-tenant cloud BI for deployment in a public or private cloud, or on-premises. It provides an in-memory columnar data store and a BI layer comprising a reporting engine, predictive analytics tools, mobile native apps, dashboards, discovery tools,…

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Birst is a versatile business intelligence tool that caters to multiple departments across organizations. Users from Sales, Finance, …
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Birst almost live access

6 out of 10
January 09, 2019
Birst is used as a delivery mechanism to display data to our client. We collect data on mobile device usage patterns, as well as analyst …
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Birst review

2 out of 10
March 30, 2018
Incentivized
We used Birst as a visualization tool for selling our analytical services to our clients. It was used by multiple people internally (data …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Popular Features

View all 20 features
  • Drill-down analysis (78)
    8.0
    80%
  • Customizable dashboards (77)
    8.0
    80%
  • Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.) (72)
    8.0
    80%
  • Formatting capabilities (77)
    7.0
    70%
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Pricing

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Basic License

$30,000

On Premise
Per 20 Users Per Year

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttp://bit.ly/2n6VznO

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Extending Analytics in CloudSuite Distribution - Demo

YouTube

Analytics Anytime, Anywhere - Birst Mobile Demo

YouTube

Automated Data Refinement in Infor Birst - Demo

YouTube

Best Practices For Increasing Adoption of Analytics - Demo

YouTube

Infor Birst How-To Series – Connecting to Databases

YouTube
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Features

BI Standard Reporting

Standard reporting means pre-built or canned reports available to users without having to create them.

7.4
Avg 8.2

Ad-hoc Reporting

Ad-Hoc Reports are reports built by the user to meet highly specific requirements.

7
Avg 8.1

Report Output and Scheduling

Ability to schedule and manager report output.

8
Avg 8.4

Data Discovery and Visualization

Data Discovery and Visualization is the analysis of multiple data sources in a search for patterns and outliers and the ability to represent the data visually.

6.9
Avg 8.1

Access Control and Security

Access control means being able to determine who has access to which data.

8.3
Avg 8.6

Mobile Capabilities

Support for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets.

5
Avg 7.9
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Product Details

What is Infor Birst?

Infor Birst is a BI product that enables a single view of data and eliminate data silos. Additionally, decentralized teams and individual users can augment this shared analytic fabric with their own local data, without compromising data governance. This consistency comes from a unified semantic layer, which maintains common definitions and key metrics, no matter where users sit.

Birst achieves Networked BI through a 2-tier architecture that aligns back-end enterprise data with line-of-business or local, edge data. Birst’s Automated Data Refinement extracts data from any source (data stores, applications, warehouses, big data, and unstructured external sources) into a unified semantic layer. The result is a consistent view that enables users with self-service analytics through dashboards, reporting, visual discovery, mobile tools, and predictive analytics. Birst Open Client Interface also offers integration with Tableau, Excel and R.

Birst goes to market in two primary ways:

  • Direct, for enterprises using Birst for analytics on internal data to drive improved business outcomes
  • Embedded, for all size companies who offer data (analytics) products, by embedding and white-labeling Birst capabilities into their products

Birst’s product is packaged in 3 available formats:

  • Platform and per-user fee
  • By Department or Business Unit
  • By end-customer (for embedded scenarios)

Infor Birst Features

BI Platform Features

  • Supported: Administration via Windows App
  • Supported: Administration via MacOS App
  • Supported: Administration via Web Interface
  • Supported: Live Connection to External Data
  • Supported: Snapshot of External Data
  • Supported: In-memory data model
  • Supported: OLAP (Pre-processed cube representation)
  • Supported: ROLAP (SQL-layer querying)
  • Supported: Multi-Data Source Reporting (Blending)
  • Supported: Data warehouse / dictionary layer
  • Supported: ETL Capability
  • Supported: ETL Scheduler

Supported Data Sources Features

  • Supported: MS Excel Workbooks
  • Supported: Text Files (CSV, etc)
  • Supported: Oracle
  • Supported: MS SQL Server
  • Supported: IBM DB2
  • Supported: Postgres
  • Supported: MySQL
  • Supported: ODBC
  • Supported: Cloudera Hadoop
  • Supported: Hortonworks Hadoop
  • Supported: EMC Greenplum
  • Supported: IBM Netezza
  • Supported: HP Vertica
  • Supported: ParAccel
  • Supported: SAP Hana
  • Supported: Teradata
  • Supported: Salesforce
  • Supported: SAP
  • Supported: Google Analytics

BI Standard Reporting Features

  • Supported: Pixel Perfect reports
  • Supported: Customizable dashboards
  • Supported: Report Formatting Templates

Ad-hoc Reporting Features

  • Supported: Drill-down analysis
  • Supported: Formatting capabilities
  • Supported: Predictive modeling
  • Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages
  • Supported: Report sharing and collaboration

Report Output and Scheduling Features

  • Supported: Publish to Web
  • Supported: Publish to PDF
  • Supported: Output Raw Supporting Data
  • Supported: Report Delivery Scheduling

Data Discovery and Visualization Features

  • Supported: Pre-built visualization formats (heatmaps, scatter plots etc.)
  • Supported: Location Analytics / Geographic Visualization
  • Supported: Predictive Analytics
  • Supported: Support for Machine Learning models
  • Supported: Integration with R or other statistical packages

Access Control and Security Features

  • Supported: Multi-User Support (named login)
  • Supported: Role-Based Security Model
  • Supported: Multiple Access Permission Levels (Create, Read, Delete)
  • Supported: Report-Level Access Control
  • Supported: Table-Level Access Control (BI-layer)
  • Supported: Field-Level Access Control (BI-layer)

Mobile Capabilities Features

  • Supported: Responsive Design for Web Access
  • Supported: Mobile Application
  • Supported: Dashboard / Report / Visualization Interactivity on Mobile

Infor Birst Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of

Infor Birst Videos

Infor Birst Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise, Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based
Operating SystemsWindows, Mac
Mobile ApplicationApple iOS, Android, Mobile Web
Supported CountriesAll
Supported LanguagesArabic, English, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Simplified Chinese, Spanish

Frequently Asked Questions

Infor Birst offers multi-tenant cloud BI for deployment in a public or private cloud, or on-premises. It provides an in-memory columnar data store and a BI layer comprising a reporting engine, predictive analytics tools, mobile native apps, dashboards, discovery tools, and an open client interface.

Alteryx, InsideSales.com / XANT Predictive Pipeline (discontinued), and Datameer are common alternatives for Infor Birst.

Reviewers rate Report Delivery Scheduling and Multi-User Support (named login) highest, with a score of 9.

The most common users of Infor Birst are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(186)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Birst is a versatile business intelligence tool that caters to multiple departments across organizations. Users from Sales, Finance, Accounting, and HR departments rely on Birst to establish a single source of truth and move away from individual definitions of data. Zalora, for example, utilizes Birst as their primary tool for self-service data needs, including data extraction for operational purposes and simple ad-hoc analysis. The fulfillment center employs Birst to track item or product level KPIs, while the marketing teams make use of Birst Live data and dashboards to monitor campaign sales and discounts. Birst integrates with various data sources like Google Analytics, event tracking, operational data, and sales data through a separate data warehouse. By distributing reports and dashboards across the company for viewing, Birst serves as an enterprise-wide BI visualization and distribution platform that supports different revenue models while providing reporting automation, visualization, and distribution capabilities. Furthermore, Birst is embedded into cloud-based software provided to customers, enabling the monitoring of software utilization and tracking of marketing campaigns. Salesforce users benefit from BIRST Dashboards integrated into Salesforce pages as it provides sales analytics and pipeline tracking. The time-to-delivery advantage offered by Birst was one of the reasons it was chosen by many organizations. It allows for simple gathering of company-wide data streams without the need for manual data warehouse construction or report building. With Birst's robust features, it is used across various industries and departments such as SCM & Operations teams, Sales teams, partners, finance, marketing, product management, clinical data analysis in hospitals, education institutions for measuring performance effectiveness and much more. Overall, Birst fulfills a wide range of use cases and enables businesses to analyze data effectively and gain valuable insights to drive informed decision-making throughout the organization.

Highly versatile and user-friendly: Users have found Birst to be a highly versatile and user-friendly business intelligence tool. They appreciate the intuitive user interface, which makes tasks easy to perform. Many reviewers have mentioned that even users with limited technical skills can quickly navigate the platform and start using its features effectively.

Knowledgeable and proactive support: Many users highly value the knowledgeable and proactive support provided by Birst. The support team is responsive and helpful in providing excellent guidance. Reviewers have expressed satisfaction with their interactions with the support team, highlighting their expertise in resolving issues promptly.

Customizable user interface: Users appreciate the customizable user interface of Birst, which allows them to tailor the platform to their changing business needs. The flexibility of the interface is seen as a major advantage by several reviewers who mention being able to personalize dashboards, reports, and visualizations according to their specific requirements.

Confusing User Interface: Users have found the user interface of Birst to be perplexing and not user-friendly. Some reviewers have mentioned that it has a steep learning curve and lacks proper organization and categorization of custom expressions.

Lack of Support from Technical Team: Several users expressed frustration with the lack of support from Birst's technical team. They reported difficulties in reaching them over the phone and dissatisfaction with their insistence on scheduling calls even after submitting detailed tickets.

Difficult Data Modeling Process: Users encountered challenges with data modeling in Birst, especially for those who were new to the platform. The ETL tools were described as inadequate, leading some users to rely on alternative platforms for data warehousing.

Users commonly recommend Birst for its intuitive and effective business intelligence and data analysis capabilities. They attribute Birst as a comprehensive solution with a low total cost of ownership. Additionally, users suggest Birst for its cloud-based central BI solutions, emphasizing their focus on security and scalability. Another frequently mentioned recommendation is Birst's top-notch visualization capabilities, making it an ideal choice for organizations seeking advanced data visualization tools. Users also find Birst to be highly capable and user-friendly, highlighting its excellent analytics and AI capabilities.

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 96)
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Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

Depending on the complexity of your company's data and business needs it may or may not be a good fit. I would say it can be a good BI ecosystem for small and mid-size companies with low complexity so they can have data ingestion and reporting capabilities with one single tool.

If you need to integrate data from many different data source;, your environment does change quite frequently, you have many different business areas, the data volume you have is quite big... then it is less appropriate.

January 14, 2019

Birst Review

Martin Hollænder | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you need a end-to-end BI product with a lot of features and capability for making custom reports, Birst is great. However your company needs to be of a certain size and there are a lot of other similar products out there that are at least as good. An important note is to try different products, really be clear on that you need and not choose Birst lightly.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Birst is very appropriate for companies that have a low to mid-level of technical sophistication with data preparation, but have a high need for visibility and distribution. I think that it *can* become a good option for mid-sized companies for whom large scale BI implementations like Cognos or MicroStrategies are not practical, or in our case, even relevant, but it can be frustrating for those who have a high level of technical experience with data warehouse development as the tool is very specific and has a fairly steep learning curve, and the technical support resources don't always seem to have the appropriate level of expertise to deal with advanced users.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Birst is well suited for an organization looking for a cloud-hosted analytics solution that is contained within one package. It is able to connect to a very wide variety of different data sources, and has options for either light or involved ETL procedures, depending on the users experience with preparing data. As with any BI project, it would not be suitable for an organization where there is no dedicated team to maintain and manage the project.
January 09, 2019

Birst almost live access

Tim Welch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We find the performance of the dashboards is sometimes very slow - and has been noted by customers. a key question would be to confirm the acceptable delay and build the dashboards around that kpi.
Score 5 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Well suited to provide an easy to use dashboard for non-data analysts. Allows for pulling off figures easily due to the filtering tool and being able to hold multiple different databases on one server. The small visualizations that it does provide are useful as well for our teams. For weekly reporting it is a useful tool, and is easily able to link to other software as well.

For a software which needs to be frequently updated on a schedule it is not always very suitable. There are some instances where in which Birst is down and we are unable to produce reports on time or with the most recent information.
Robin Filan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
It's not like Tableau, it's a whole BI platform to combine data from lots of sources. It does that better than a lot of other tools and has a good method for distribution. The learning curve is VERY high.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Birst is great for visualizing large amounts of data. They provide a number of different visuals to help better understand data. They are very good at descriptive data, however, if you would like to get into predictive or preemptive analytics, another tool might be better suited.
Sean Keesler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
If you are looking for "Instant BI", Birst isn't that tool.
If you want to roll your own solution using a single application to perform all of your ETL, reporting/dashboard, like to get deep in the weeds and have a lot of control of how your data is processed, this is going to make you smile.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Processing your own well-defined datasets seems to work well. Trying to process more dynamic sets where the data is not well defined (customer defined fields) is not impossible, but takes a lot more work arounds and tricks.

Working with trend data works well. Trying to report on real-time operational data is more tricky due to the time it takes to process your space. I have not used some of their direct connection offerings that might help alleviate that though.
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Birst is a great tool for supporting well-governed analytics data modeling. It has a good balance between the effort required by an IT/ETL specialist and business analysts and reports writers.
Birst does not shy away from the challenges of data governance and stewardship vs the dangers of "quick and easy" departmental or project specific analytic projects where business rules are "invented" vs managed and data cube chaos can quickly become a big IT problem.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Birst is a fantastic tool for quick decisions and big picture analytics. The ability to build dashboards and dashlets allows for significant amounts of data being presented on mobile or full-size devices. The challenge comes with deep analytics. While details can be provided on the dashboards or via reports, these are not always easily manipulated in the same as say an Excel sheet.
Stephane F. Tremblay | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized

Appropriate:

- To provide self-service analytics to our customers, its embedding capabilities, self-services tools and ETL capabilities.

Less appropriate:

- The platform has the disadvantage of its advantages, it does many things for you but not always to your liking so we sometimes had to bypass Birst and work with the DB directly for instance. We also faced challenges to make the platform fit in our context using streaming data sources and the delivery of a single solution into different customers environment.

March 16, 2018

Birstarific

David Pearlman | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Birst is well suited for companies looking to automate pipeline /activity reporting especially for companies that don't have complicated backend systems. We have a "ninja" at D&B who's well versed within Birst which helps a ton. Development is performed by him / his team and we QA and develop new use cases.
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Birst works better for non-complex BI solutions.

Being a cloud solution helps with adoption of the tool, as there's no need to have an internal support team dedicated to platform maintenance. The usage of Network BI is quite buggy and should be avoided for complex BI solutions. Management of users is very complex in large organisations, as the administration interface is very reduced and Birst support is needed (with the delays it brings).
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Well suited to enterprise reporting when data model valid, one version of the truth if used by all areas for data that is processed consistently for up to date information. Not well suited for dynamic changes within the org where either data changes are required or new reporting is needed as users are used to Excel and doing their own reports faster. It is too technical and complicated for average business user, especially if data model is not simple and easy to follow.
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